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East on each return trip. In the following pages, however, the focus willbe on the major differences in the consumption, investment, and exchangebehavior of the three villages. Briefly, in the Mappila Muslim village, agreat deal of emphasis was given to distributing remittances to the largestcircle of people within the community and to supporting religious activities.The Ezhava Hindus spent large sums of money on elaborations of lifecyclerituals during which there was lavish gift-giving and entertaining.Thus, there was a smaller circle of exchange than in the Mappila village. Inthe Syrian Christian village, the gains of migration were largely confinedto the immediate family. Some amount went to religious causes, but forthe most part the emphasis was on saving the money earned, to be usedlater for dowries for daughters and for professional education for sons. Themajor forms of economic investment in the three communities varied also,from business activities in the Mappila Muslim community, to usuriouslending in the Ezhava Hindu village, to fixed deposits and bonds in theSyrian Christian locality.196The primary fieldwork was conducted over a nineteen-month period,between June 1989 and December 1990. I lived in or near each of thethree villages for between three and five months during my period offieldwork. I made two subsequent trips to southern India in 1993 and 1997and maintained sporadic correspondence with scholars and residents inKerala to keep up with the consequences of migration in the state. My aimwhile conducting fieldwork was to have data of three kinds: communitylevelinformation, general household-level information, and case studiesof representative households of different types such as long-term, shortterm,and returned-migrant as well as non-migrant households. As far aspossible, I collected these data for the major classes and castes in the threeareas. I had a detailed schedule of questions for both community-leveland household-level information. I used that as a guide, but the focus andthe way I asked the questions varied, depending on the situation and theresponse of the people. I talked to a range of people – women and men – inthe village and panchayat offices, travel agencies, banks, schools and preschools,shops, hospitals, and police stations, in addition to the women,men, and adolescents that I met in the different households. During my stayin the three villages, I visited a total of 276 households, some for only a fewminutes, others for several long visits, but due to a variety of circumstances,a proper survey study was not possible. Thus, the information collectedthrough my house visits was more in the form of descriptive case materialthan tabulatable statistics. Instead of tabulations, I noted recurring themesin the accounts and collapsed them into ideal type descriptions of the areas.